Alabama’s Coordinators Were Issue Against Clemson in Title Game

In the wake of Alabama-Clemson national title game, I called Dave Bartoo, known as the College Football Matrix, to ask him what he thought caused the lopsided outcome.

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Bartoo, who consults with major college football programs on analytics, wasn’t surprised at Alabama’s 44-16 meltdown against Clemson.“It wasn’t the talent,” he said. “They had the talent. It wasn’t the schedule. The schedule was set up for them. What they lack are quality coordinators.”

Bartoo said Alabama’s coordinators — Michael Locksley (offense) and Tosh Lupoi (defense) — were an issue against Clemson on Monday.

“Finally, in Game 15, it caught up to them,” Bartoo said. “You look at those two guys, how many programs can do something like this? In fact, nobody can except Alabama and they couldn’t get it done (against Clemson).”

“Locksley… his career grade is a D-. We’re talking bottom 25 percent of all offensive coordinators before he took the Alabama job,” Bartoo said. “And then you have Lupoi, who has never called plays before in his life, so we just gave him a C-grade.”

There has not been a single team win a national title game in the last 15 years that started the season with both coordinators as a C-grade or worse. In fact, the only team to win one with a C-grade at all is Auburn in their basically miracle season of 2010.”

The conversation with Bartoo was wide-ranging and worth your time. We also discussed Oregon Ducks football, the Pac-12′s roadmap back to a title game, and more.Bartoo on Oregon’s 2011 national title game appearance:

“You want to talk about outlier. Of this century, there are two major outliers who made a national championship game. One of them is Virginia Tech (vs. Florida State)…. what Virgina Tech had was the No. 1 quarterback, Michael Vick. The next big outlier was the Oregon team in 2010. It didn’t recruit inside the Top 10 and didn’t have a NFL quarterback (Darron Thomas)… when you talk about Fairy Tale seasons… that was an amazing opportunity.”